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Even with Beta to help keep me occupied with WOW’s 12+ months of no new content, I’ve still been seeking out other games to occupy my time. Thus, for the last few months, I have been working on learning League of Legends. At this point, I’ve played a whole 2 PVP games, and have otherwise been spending most of my time in the “bot” game mode (co-op vs AI). Thus, today, my goal is to talk about Learning the game. I have run into a lot of people in the Bot games who don’t know the basic strategies of what they need to be successful in the Bot games. So, below are my tips for new players along with descriptions of my own experiences in learning the game.

Tip #1 – After the tutorials, play lots of “Intro Bot” games

LOL has two tutorials (a basic tutorial and a battle training tutorial). You can repeat these tutorials a couple of times to get used to the basic feel of the game. However, most of the learning is going to occur while playing the Intro Difficulty in your Summoner’s Rift map co-op vs AI games. This new Intro difficulty is a repeatable and relatively safe place to learn about the game until you hit level 10 (see the news release on why they released this new difficulty). If you previously quit trying to play LOL because of how hard it was to learn the game, this is an opportunity to come back and try again.

The benefits of Intro Bots over Beginner Bots:

Intro bots gives you some time to farm minion kills in your lane before you will be harassed by the other team’s bots. This allows you to get a lot of gold via killing the other team’s minions.

The item store is a little simpler, giving you time to learn how to build items. The delay of the bots coming out also gives you time to explore the item store more to plan your item buys.

The bots are tuned to be easier to play against: They don’t build as many awesome items, and they don’t react as fast when using their abilities.

If you make mistakes while trying to learn, it often won’t hurt your team all that much. With a lot of people playing alt (“Smurf”) accounts, this difficulty level will result in winning more often, reinforcing your play time with rewards.

Tip # 2: Turrets are deadly killing machines – know when to retreat

If the turret isn’t shooting a minion, it will melt your face off.

Even in the bot games, the bots know to stay out of range of your turrets. However, many of the other players seem to just dive right into the turret and get their faces melted off. You want the turret to be shooting at minions, not your face. So, never be in range of the enemy’s turret unless your minions are protecting you and taking all the hits. In general, staying behind minions all the time is a good idea. It is far better to lose some minions than have your face melted. The intro bots turret doesn’t hit quite as hard as other game modes, but treat the turrets like lava – only go into turret range to kill the turret when you have minions to protect you.

If you are standing in the enemy’s turret and you shoot at one of your enemies, the turret will aggro on you and kill you. So, knowing when to fall back from the enemy turret is the most important thing to know. I spent a lot of time learning how to run away and save myself from death, and I had a lot of early deaths via turrets because I wouldn’t pay enough attention to my surroundings. Whatever you do, do not stand in the turret if there are not minions in the turret with you.

However, bots often won’t chase you into your own turrets. So, you can escape from the bots by retreating into the safety range of your team’s turrets. In the easier bot game difficulties, the bushes also tend to drop aggro from some of the bots. Learning when to disengage from a battle and run away was the most important skill of all. The game can go bad very fast if you “Feed” the bots by repeatedly dying. Staying alive is more important than getting a kill. Don’t leave the Intro Bots difficulty until you’ve learned how to minimize your time spent getting hit by turrets – because the turrets in beginner bots will melt your face.

Tip # 3: Maximize your use of items

Another rookie mistake (in addition to death by turret) is in not maximizing the use of items. Just like wearing agility gear on a restoration druid is going to make your life much more difficult in WOW, itemization for your LOL character matters. Every time you get the killing blow on a minion or bot, you earn gold. Your team also earns gold from completing objectives (e.g., killing turrets, killing mobs in the jungle, etc). In general, there is a “right” way to spend your gold, and very many “Wrong” ways to spend your gold. Many items have “Unique” effect items – which means that two of them won’t stack. So, you only want to buy one of each item. The biggest rookie mistake of itemization is buying more than one of the same thing, so be careful not to duplicate the same “unique” effects and waste gold.

Intro bot learning supports will help you with choosing items. It gives you recommended gear pages that help you in building item sets that are (mostly) appropriate. As you learn the game, it still helps to know the “optimal” gearing via reading guides about the champions from various fansites. You want to buy items that will help you the most. You can also make custom gear sets, on your summoner profile page. I have saved item sets to help me more easily buy things on my characters that I frequently play. I chose the items based on reading guides on sites like Lolking that told me what items were “best”.

Keep in mind that you can buy cheaper components to build into end-game items, so spend gold early on the components you want to work on building – and then upgrade those to the complete end product as you get more gold.

Summoners Rift has three lanes, referred to as: Top, Mid, and Bot. The setup for all Bot games are different than the traditional PVP roles. So, in learning Bot games, there are specific setups from the bots you should be aware of:

Top lane has two bots. These are usually fighter and/or tank roles (often using attack power and defensive stats). So, two people in beginner bots typically go to cover the top lane (with the exception that some people try “jungle” practice – see below Jungle note). Champions such as Garen make for easy top lane picks. Other top lane champion examples: Teemo, renekton, Leona, and Gangplank.

Mid lane has one bot. This is typically a ranged spell caster (Ability Power – AP). So, you should have one person playing a caster (AP mid) on this lane. Ryze is often considered easy, but I found that Ryze tended to be the bot we had to fight against (and I could lose in a Ryze vs Ryze fight early in learning the game). To counter Ryze-bot, Malzahar is my current favorite for doing beginner and intermediate-level bot games, since his ultimate plus all his ticking DOTs end up being really strong. Other mid-lane options include: Ziggs, Lissandra, Morgana, Lux, etc.

Bottom lane has two bots. This typically includes one ranged (Attack Damage Carry), and one support bot. Choosing ranged and/or support bots for the bottom lane works the best. Options for the AD Carry include: Ashe, Miss Fortune, Caitlyn, and Sivir. Supports are typically characters with both damage and utility (or healing) abilities. I found Soraka to be a good starting support, since I could dish out some damage while also having healing abilities. Other supports include: Jana, Annie (who can also play mid),

Bots don’t do “Jungle” roles. In PVP, someone takes the role of Jungle (e.g., instead of going top lane, one player floats around the middle of the map, killing monster objectives and helping to gank people in lanes). While some people will practice jungle in bot games, new players should avoid learning about jungle roles until you get more experienced at the game. Since bots don’t ever go jungle, the PVP setup is different than what you learn in the bot games.

Some other general notes: For intro bot games, we tend to push pretty far before the bots make any traction. However, for beginner and intermediate difficulty, knowing the bot late-game strategy is helpful. After killing enough turrets (especially in harder bot difficulties), the bots tend to stick together more often. This means that after their “end of lane phase” is triggered, the bots will usually group up together. So, when you see bots abandoning their otherwise assigned lanes, you should lend more support to your team. The bots will also choose to defend their base when it is being threatened, meaning that if you are doing really well in a lane, you can expect more bots to come target you.

For learning more about the champions, you can use the free champion rotation to try out champions before you buy them (either with real money, or points you earn). I’d suggest eventually buying at least one champion you like to play for each role (so that you can have a static set of characters you play across weeks). With so many options to choose from, finding characters you like is better than playing the ones that high-end players think are “best” (often, the best high-end characters make the worst ones to start with to learn anyway). Use guides on sites like Lolking (e.g. the “wowhead” of League of legends) to help you learn more about the champions, their itemization, skills, and such. In the end, practice is the only way to get better in the game – make sure that you play the same few champions (I recommend one for each lane – to be somewhat flexible in your group picks) until you get comfortable with how to play the game.

Tip #5: Play nice and communicate with your team

This is a game, and you are supposed to be having fun. Yelling and cursing at people who are trying to learn the game is particularly unhelpful. When you are on the champion selection screen, communicate with people and tell your team what lane you want – before you lock in a character (e.g., say Top, Mid, or Bot). In addition, people will say “GLHF” which stands for “Good luck, have fun!” If you communicate well with your team and you are friendly, you can get honored by your fellow players (e.g., they can rate you as: friendly, helpful, and good teamwork). After the game, if you think someone did a good job, you can rate them positively, too. Also, League of Legends generally has pretty strict language requirements. If you are mean to your other teammates, you are likely to get reported and suspended. So, have fun and play nice! Experienced players may even help you out along the way if you come to the games with a positive attitude and communicate with your team.

Wildstar and World of Warcraft are both introducing “housing” systems into their content. Warcraft just released a post about how their garrisons will work. I wanted to take a minute to talk about how Warcraft isn’t actually introducing player “housing” into the game. Instead, the garrison feature is a military base. While I am more likely to stick with WOW due to my long-term investment, and I have issues with other aspects of Wildstar that make it less appealing to me, the one thing I do like is the Wildstar housing system. In that respect, Wildstar delivers a more traditional take on building your own aesthetic house. Blizzard, on the other hand, is allowing us to have some amount of choice in building our military base, but that choice is still largely limited compared to Wildstar’s full customization of your own plot of land.

Wildstar housing:

Starting from low levels (around level 14), you can build and customize your own house. You gain materials and items for your house from the early leveling experience thru max level.

There is a wide variety of enhancements for the decor, so that your house won’t likely look like someone else’s house. There are, however, general themes in terms of being related to various races, for example. So, houses will likely share some features with other houses, especially early in the content release.

You can even customize the color of the sky if you really want. The important part is that your own house will feel unique because it’s unlikely that anyone else will have built the exact same thing. In this respect, you build a cosmetic house that serves the purpose of driving intrinsic motivation related to finding new treasures you can use to personalize your home.

Starting at level 90, building a garrison is integrated into the leveling experience from 90 to 100.

In the various zones, you will be given options to choose from specific pre-fab buildings. There are three levels of each building, with the stables (for example), getting bigger and fancier as you level them up.

You can’t currently customize the look of any of the buildings. If you have a stables at level 3, it looks just like everyone else’s stables at level 3.

As you level, you will be prompted to pick 1 of 2 buildings that impacts your leveling experience in a particular zone (though recipes are available later on to pick up those buildings you skipped, if you change your mind!). This might be neat the second time you play an alt in the zones, since your building choices will impact your questing experiences – perhaps your alt will choose all the opposite buildings in every zone.

While completing the quests that give you access to building types is incredibly important for the leveling process if you want access to garrisons, you can also potentially skip this process and buy blueprints instead, meaning that on your 4th alt, you can still avoid the feeling of “chores”.

A focus of your garrison is on the people that inhabit your base, not on actually building and customizing the base. You will send your garrisons on missions, and you will basically serve as the commander to this army that you accumulate as you strengthen your base. They may make your world feel more populated, but your garrison won’t be your own personal retreat to hide from the world. While your base will feel populated, they won’t be populated with your guild members, since there is no guild housing.

These followers and rewards include content related to the extrinsic rewards of gaining access to crafting materials and bonuses that enhance your solo questing experiences. While garrisons may be fun, the point is to get things you need for completing other content. So, your crafting needs may shape some of the decisions you make related to your building plots.

A benefit of the garrisons is that there will likely be a great deal of content tied to this system, allowing for more solo play related to trying to defeat the Iron Horde.

Your final garrison can have up to 10 of the 21 buildings, meaning that most people will have roughly half of the available options once their garrison is complete. Thus, while you and your friend may have different choices you made along the way, the general aesthetics across a couple dozen garrisons (of the same faction) may have a really similar look and feel. You get to customize your garrison, but only to a certain point.

So, in the end, World of Warcraft isn’t really introducing housing, in the traditional sense. Instead, they are introducing military bases that allow you to have some form of customization. The garrison system is going to probably be a fun system; but if you want to build a house, you may have to look elsewhere. Maybe I can still keep my Lord of the Rings Online house for a while longer to have my own sense of home.

My hope is that they may eventually introduce more hooks for aesthetic customization in the World of Warcraft garrisons. Until then, I’ll enjoy building my military base, and wishing I could change the color of the wallpaper.

Post on optimum number of buttons in a rotation & review some classes.

With news of the stat squish, reducing our insane number inflation back down to something more reasonable, there is another area of reduction that needs attention. This area is in the inflation of the number of abilities each class has access to and uses on a regular basis. As Lore pointed out on the forums, it could be easy to remove buttons people never use, but the bigger problem is in the number of buttons people DO use.

While some people are worried that reducing the number of buttons will increase homogenization, I actually think it would do the opposite. Due to 10-man raiding for high-end content, we have increased the number of buttons so that 10-man raiders wouldn’t be missing any necessary tools to defeat the encounter. You had to defeat the hardest content in the game with only 2 healers present (meaning that every healer had to bring every tool, or they would risk getting benched). In thinking about the “ability squish”, the nature of Mythic 20-man raiding means that you can require one of each of the 11 classes to be present for optimal raiding, and can balance the game around the idea that you would have around 5 healers likely to be present in the raid. While requiring a “frost mage” or “resto druid” specifically could be problematic, abilities available to all classes allow for more unique flavor if an ability is taken away from some of the classes that had to bring the abilities just for the 10-man content. To get more unique flavor, while having fewer overall buttons, it may be time to remove some places of redundancy.

How should ability bloat be managed? By removing unused abilities and reducing the number of redundant abilities (if two buttons do basically the same thing, one should just be removed and the other potentially improved to compensate if needed). Below are some examples of potential areas by which redundancy and unused abilities can be identified for potential removal/consolidation. While I use specific examples from druids and mages (the classes I am familiar with),

Remove buttons that are not used by your specialization: While healers still need to be able to do damage to things, and damage dealers still need healing/survivability tools, there is really no reason for a frost mage to have fire mage spells, or vice-versa. We could actually reduce homogenization by taking away more of the unnecessary and potentially redundant off-spec abilities from the main spec of a class. For druids, while having the ability to use moonfire in feral forms could be interesting (with the new level 100 talent), that is likely just going to increase the ability bloat without being a useful or necessary tool in the first place. Removing more unnecessary buttons in terms of reducing off-spec buttons would actually help to keep button bloat from getting out of control, and this is especially true for pure-DPS classes where these tools increase redundancy and confusion without increasing effectiveness or fun. Now that we have gotten used to the idea of split tool sets, the hard decisions of splitting more tools and increasing the unique set of abilities available to each specialization within a class absolutely needs to be done.

Combine mechanics that are redundant with other mechanics – There are some things that actually should be “homogenized” in terms of having two things that function the same having different names and category labels for no real good reason. An example of how this has worked well in the past is putting multiple cleanse mechanics into one dispel button (instead of one button for removing poisons and another for curses). Another example in the current expansion, Soothe is still not consolidated with other dispel mechanics. In terms of what soothe does, it seems to dispel some (but not all!) enrage effects (what’s an enrage again?). In the end, enrage is really just another name for a type of “buff that increases your damage”, and there are also lots of other different classifications of “buff that increases your damage” and so it should share the same classifications and rules of game-play as other mechanics as other buffs that increase your damage. I’d suggest removing spells like Soothe and instead changing current enrage effects to either be dispelled by other class dispels or balanced around not being dispelled. Make all boss enrages either not dispelled or magic effects. The dispels for enrage effects are an under-utilized feature in PVE (I can count on one hand the number of raid encounters where soothe was useful in the last 9 years of the game), and an obtuse and confusing mechanic in PVP. The “enrage” warrior damage increase ability and mechanics could still be called enrage in terms of the name (the way that Eclipse is the name of a moonkin buff that increases damage), but “enrage” effects that are dispelled in PVE (or even in PVP) by things like Soothe could be changed to a different classification of spell mechanics – such as magic, or just not be able to be dispelled at all. At this point, I’m not sure that Soothe even removes warrior enrage in the first place (because enrage mechanics in terms of whether dispels work or not are so poorly defined that druids can’t actually agree on what soothe does at all). Removing things like “enrage” as a spell category with its own set of dispel mechanics could allow for consolidating buttons by eliminating the need for Soothe. While warriors need a buff that increases their damage, it doesn’t have to be its own special “enrage” magic type that is set apart from other mechanics that function exactly the same (that is really just a damage buff mechanic by another name). In fact, not being able to dispel enrage-type mechanics at all would make it easier to balance what enrage mechanics do in PVP and PVE alike. There is no reason for druids to have one button that specifically dispels enrages from enemy targets and another button that cleanses magic, poison, and curses from friendly targets. Just like combining the button that dispelled different debuff categories from friendly players, Soothe is a button that doesn’t need to clog up druid bars.

Put the breaks on healing button wars – Now that we can balance around 20-man mythic, healers need fewer buttons that are tailored around two types of healing rotations: a set of buttons for single-target and a set of buttons for AOE healing. There is no need for three single-target direct heals that are both redundant with the other healing spells, but also are the exact same for each healing class (the original “triad” model). Instead, each class should have the single-target heals that makes the most sense and are the least redundant with their class-specific tools. For druids, removing Nourish is an obvious candidate. In terms of AOE heals, the emphasis should be on making sure that all classes have an AOE healing toolset, but that the number of actual buttons they use for AOE healing doesn’t balloon out of hand (especially since raiders are likely to use both single-target and AOE heals in raids). In some places, redundancy should be reduced to increase the unique feeling of classes, even if that means we have to give up some tools we’re used to having (but with an emphasis on removing buttons we hardly ever actually use, or contribute very little to our overall healing). If a healing spell only contributes to 5% (or less) of your total healing being done across an entire expansion, is that spell still important to have access to? The number of buttons that healers are using inside and outside of raids should be examined and should be reduced. The emphasis should be placed on reducing redundancy in healing toolkits – and undoing some of the damage caused by the 10 vs 25-man healing split.

Reduce redundancy and increase uniqueness of single-target damage rotations: Bring damage rotation buttons back under control. Reduce number of damage cooldown abilities for each class (especially redundant things that people could macro together if they were on the same cooldown). For example, do we have too much damage from all classes coming from DOT/bleed effects? How many simultaneous DOTs/Debuffs does each class need? Are there places (similar to removing insect swarm for moonkin) where removing abilities could make the rotation feel better? While there is a core set of roles that have to be filled by a rotation, there can be complexity without the need to constantly watch 10 different timers in some cases. At this point, we have mistaken overloading memory and attention capacities as the primary criteria by which we evaluate “interesting” damage rotations. A rotation with 4 buttons could potentially be even more fun and interesting than something with 20 buttons – in this case, more is really not always better.

Reduce redundancy and increase clarity of intended AOE damage rotations: With my frost mage, when multiple targets are available, I have too many possible tools that I could use to deal with those targets, leading to more confusion than fun. If there was a more clearly defined AOE strategy (rather than 10 different possible damage spells that do damage to more than 1 target), frost mages might have an easier time dealing with AOE damage. You need a spreadsheet to tell you the maximum efficiency of the damage use between: DOT/bomb (the 3 possible bomb talents you can choose before the fight), Ice Lance cleave to spread mastery damage (likely used during a DOT-cleave strategy), frost nova (Does AOE damage and freezes them in place, on a cooldown), cone of cold (does damage and slows them, on a cooldown), Blizzard (is channeled, with a slow), frozen orb (on a 1 min cooldown), arcane explosion (stand in melee and spam the instant button), and flame strike (a cast time spell to place a damage circle on the ground that ticks over time). These 10 total abilities are all incredibly redundant and you can’t use all three at the same time. Instead, the muddiness and confusion of the AOE tools means that a DOT/bomb + cleave strategy almost always ends up working out the best, with not actually using the tools we should use for AOE. In a raiding situation, I’m only likely to use 3 to 4 of these 10 possible buttons (but, all 10 buttons take up space on my bars!). So, having all of these abilities in their overlap of roles is actually more harmful than good. What is the point, for example, of a frost mage having flame strike, blizzard, and arcane explosion? Instead of three super redundant abilities, if we just had 1 of these that was clearly defined in an AOE rotation, we could actually be better balanced in our AOE damage and have a more unique feeling AOE rotation between each mage specialization. So, if Blizzard was uniquely available to frost (and frost didn’t have either arcane blast or flame strike), and was designed to fit more intuitively within the frost mage PVE rotation (potentially channeled for a shorter period of time and worked with the frost mastery or the 8 other abilities I listed above), that could allow for frost’s AOE rotation to feel more unique vs. fire or arcane (and frost mages would still have 8 total DOT/AOE/cleave abilities even if they lost two of the 10!).

Reduce redundancy in damage/healing/tanking cooldowns: While moonkin needed one additional damage increasing cooldown (or some way to control Eclipse better) to allow for controlling their damage output, in MOP, they were actually given up to 4 new buttons for managing damage output (up to two thru talents and two given baseline), which contributed to some redundancy and bloat in the toolset. This largely just brought moonkin in line with the cooldown wars that other classes had been participating in for a long time (because when everyone else has tons of cooldowns, moonkin needed them, too). As a frost mage, I have 4 cooldown buttons I hit to increase my damage: frozen orb, mirror images, alter time, & icy veins. Alter time is actually an ability I could live without ever using as a DPS increasing talent. While it was originally designed to add some fun utility, due to this spell’s interaction with buffs that increase our damage, this is used only as a DPS increase in raiding situations (with a huge drawback of randomly placing you in fire puddles of death). I could live without time warp and be perfectly happy with the four other abilities that increase my burst damage potential. Most frost mages actually just use mirror images, alter time, and icy veins all at the same time, so while mages would complain at the idea of losing any of them, the area of cooldown management is still an area for most classes where there is a huge amount of redundancy in the cooldown buffs we use. In general, the buffs that should be removed are ones that provide either the least amount of unique flavor, or provide the most drawbacks (in the case of alter time sometimes killing me in fires or removing heroism from me when someone else casts it at an inconvenient time) where the buff is also a huge trap that inexperienced players will have problems with.

Make more PVP tools not be useable in PVE (and vice versa), with better UI marking/labeling and tools for management that reduce the number of things we put on our bars: The PVP vs PVE ability wars actually end up with over-complicated PVP and PVE situations. Things like excluding long cooldowns from PVP was one area of allowing for separation in toolsets. In addition, sometimes bosses are immune to PVP mechanics. However, there are not clear markings on the abilities themselves that designate PVP vs PVE settings on the tools, and as such, we tend to clutter up our bars with both sets of tools, even when the tool on your bar isn’t going to work in the content you are currently in. In addition, with some outdoor bosses making outdoor-only tools magically become available, or some bosses that happen to NOT be immune to the PVP mechanic tool, this “set of abilities I can’t use here, but I might use somewhere, at some point” turns into ability bloat on our bars. Even with mods that help us manage our bars, the pvp vs pve toolset becomes confusing and contributes to bar bloat. Inconsistency amongst where tools may or may not be useful leads to people throwing anything from their spell book into a bar somewhere that they can reach in the 1% chance it might be useful at some point.

While I have put in some specific examples above, this is not a complete list of what tools might be removed (especially when some abilities are contingent on other class’ abilities). However, there is still a great deal of redundancy and unnecessary confusion built into the current toolsets for each class that could be fixed to improve the unique fun and feeling of each class.

The latest World of Warcraft patch brought with it a new raid size – Flex raiding. With two wings of the four total wings available in the Siege of Orgrimmar raid, I thought I would talk about some of the benefits for Flex raiding.

Variable group size. If you have 20 people on to run a weekend Flex raid, you can hop into a raid and not have to pick up 5 unknown people to form a 25-man raid. If you have 11 people, you don’t have to sit one out to form up a 10-man raid. Instead, you can run with any number of people between 10 and 25. This lowers the administrative and organizational burden. If you have 15 people online, you can hop into a raid – assuming that you have the right group makeup with tanks, DPS, and healers.

People can join & leave freely. When we would do organized LFR runs, if someone showed up 10 minutes after you started, they couldn’t join the raid. In LFR, you couldn’t swap people out between bosses. In LFR, you couldn’t replace a bad PUG with a great friend. With the new Flex runs, you can do all three! If you start the raid with 10 people, you can still end the raid night with 25 (or any amount in between). We frequently have people show up late to our Flex raids and it doesn’t cause nearly the same headache that we experienced the last few expansions without Flex raids.

Individual loot system. An administrative burden for normal & heroic raids is the need to have some way to ensure that loot is fairly distributed. In 25-man normal/heroics, we run with an addon that tracks points (EPGP). However, for the Flex nights, we don’t have to worry about distributing loot, as the use of the LFR individual loot system reduces the possibility for fighting or loot drama in the more relaxed atmosphere.

Allows for organization. Unlike LFR with strangers, you can force the raiders running Flex to be prepared for raiding. You get to choose the members of your raid team.

Wings mean you can skip more bosses. A difficult problem with having 13 or 14 bosses in a normal/heroic raid is that you often have to do 12 bosses to work on the 13th. In most cases, this means that normal/heroic raids require significant time commitments to clear the earlier bosses and unlock the later progression bosses.Having only 3 to 4 bosses in a Flex or LFR wing means that you can skip the first wing if you just want to do the second – or you can skip the first three and start on the last wing (once they are all open).

Raid with your friends. A benefit of being cross-server is that you can raid with your friends. We can bring along social guild members, battle-tag or Real-ID friends along for the fun. Our guild does a Monday night alt Flex raid where I have been able to raid on my druid for the first time this expansion, as alt LFR raids weren’t very satisfying for my raiding guild.

Raid with strangers. If you don’t have an organized flex raid with friends, you can still organize groups of strangers using tools such as Open Raid. If you can’t plan in advance, you can also use an addon called OQueue to find a group in-game. Other communities such as Twitterland Raiding have been used for people to organize cross-realm raid groups.

Taken together, what does this all mean? Well, for one – there will be fewer organized LFR runs. Most of the organized groups will be better off hitting Flex raids (meaning you won’t be lucky and happen into the rare spots in the organized LFR runs when you do run LFR). I believe that Flex will be a very popular raid size for small casual guilds or for cross-realm groups of friends that were formed to run LFR groups together, with fewer drawbacks of having to pick up random LFR people. Either way, it encourages some consistency in raiding with friends, without being super rigid the way that normal & heroic raiding is. One thing I can say for certain is that I am really enjoying Flex raiding on my druid.